Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  “There were no rational explanations for the magic that happened between us physically. Fritz was older than my father, and not as beautiful. So, it could not be explained externally.

  “Another thing we did a lot together was go to the movies. I enjoyed that, too. The advantage of having a lover who was older than my father was that we could go everyplace together . . . and we did. As crazy as I was about what people would say and think, in my own head my rationale was ‘the worst they can say about me is that I’m too dependent on my psychiatrist.’ That’s the worst they could say. Because look at this deteriorated old man and look at beautiful young Marty. We just didn’t match. That gave us freedom to do many things together. As my therapist, he’d come to the beach with me, the cabana, he’d come to the house for dinner, he’d come to parties occasionally, that I made, and be on the fringes of my ongoing social life—as much as he wanted to be.

  “I never functioned better in my life than in those years, in the sense of doing lots of things I had to do. I ran the house and the maid and our Jewish upper-middle-class social life and children and chauffeured everybody about and went back to school immediately after seeing Fritz. One of the early things he said to me was, ‘Marty, the basis of your neurosis is boredom.’ The message I got was, ‘I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. I can do something about that.’ So, I went back to the university and made up sixteen undergraduate credits in psychology and twenty-four graduate credits. And still spent anywhere from three to eight hours a day with Fritz.

  “One of the nice things we had going was that he asked me to criticize him. He also fought back, hated, and resented it, but he asked for it and came back for more. For all our personal relationships were subjected to therapeutic scrutiny. Whatever we did outside of therapy became foreground in the next therapy session, and that’s how I came to act as his therapist. Fritz was closed in many ways and put limits on what we talked about together in our personal lives. There were no limits when he was my therapist. But there were limits to gossip, chitchat, asking him questions, draining him, talking about my kids, or chatter outside my formal therapy.

  “About six months after we were together, he decided to leave Miami to push Gestalt Therapy again. He got an offer from Vin O’Connell in Columbus, Ohio, to be a training psychiatrist at one of the large mental hospitals there. That was an offer Fritz could not resist. For once, he wouldn’t be playing with dumb-bunny patients but would really be affecting psychiatry with Gestalt. And that was his baby. That was always his major interest—to put Gestalt on the map. There was never any thought of his taking me with him. Just, ‘I’m going to Columbus to be a training therapist.’

  “I screamed and cried and ranted and raved. ‘How could you do this to me? How could you leave all your patients? You’re letting me down.’ I got from that a very important message in terms of learning what responsibility means—a hard lesson, but one I have not since forgotten. And the lesson was, ‘Marty, I did for you what I could while I was here. I’m not responsible for you. I don’t owe you anything. Good-bye.’ I sure learned a lot, for I’ve come to adopt that, too.”

  Vincent O’Connell, a therapist friend, offered Fritz a chance to train psychiatric residents at the Columbus Psychiatric Clinic, Columbus State Hospital. Fritz’s willingness to take to the road once more was undoubtedly related to his increased feeling of vitality engendered, for the most part, by his close involvement with Marty Fromm.

  Upon arriving in Columbus, he stayed with Vincent and his wife, April. For three or four months he was quite happy, training residents, running groups, and rekindling his passion for Gestalt Therapy. Indeed, his involvement in his work was so intense, April O’Connell finally threw him out, not being able to take Gestalt Therapy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Marty came to visit Fritz and helped him relocate, equip, and organize a new domicile. The new address was to be a most temporary one, though, since Fritz remained in Columbus for only nine months in all. During the last three months he was on the road more often than in Ohio, visiting Marty in Miami and starting up his milk run once more.

  In the winter of 1958–59, he returned to Florida. He came to discover during his separation from her that Marty had become far more important to him than he had realized. This was not just another casual affair. There was, instead, both love and a gnawing neediness that resulted from her fulfilling desires that he had previously ignored.

  What was there about Marty that melted Fritz’s isolation? Over and above her physical beauty, he found a kindred spirit, another human being whose soul had never been shared. She was someone who felt a great deal of appreciation for the wisdom and perspective he gave to her and who showed her gratitude and love by fussing, feeding, aiding, and tidying up after him—small comforts, perhaps, but things that Fritz hadn’t experienced in years. Moreover, she was, perhaps, the first woman he had known who was intellectually stimulating and yet uncompetitive; he could argue with her and accept her divergent opinions without feeling put down.

  He appreciated Marty’s nerve, honesty, and toughness. She was always ready to speak her mind and give him a fair fight. There was none of the “I’ll protect your poor self-esteem” attitude that Laura fed back. Nor the envy.

  Fritz, always the teacher, also wanted Marty to be a Gestalt disciple. He continuously bounced ideas off her and clarified much of his own thinking through their discussions and her questioning—for half the time she had little idea of what he was talking about.

  Marty’s appeal rested, as well, in her being a fellow adventurer, someone who derived pleasure and excitement in challenging conventions and taboos. She was excited by the concept of sleeping with her therapist, delighted by the fact of loving and turning on to a physically unattractive man more than twice her age, intrigued by the idea of their illicit romance, and bold enough to join in Fritz’s experimentations with lysergic acid.

  Upon Fritz’s return, he and Marty found an apartment on the beach, a scant five minutes by car, from where she lived. It was light and airy, sunny and bright—a most pleasing place for them to spend more time together. For more than half a year, things went exceptionally well. But by the fall of 1959, their relationship began to unravel.

  The catalyst that served to tear Fritz and Marty apart was LSD—the mind-expanding psychedelic agent that Fritz, always the bold experimenter, hoped to use to gain fuller awareness of himself. It is likely, however, that even without the drug their intense relationship would have ended, as it posed great problems for Fritz, problems that caused him as much anguish and pain as he had suffered with Lucy, the adventuress he had known in Germany.

  Fritz was a man who suffered greatly, in his life, from unrequited love. He had missed the love of his father, had played second or third fiddle for his mother’s love, had had few friends as an adolescent, had lost his closest pal in the war, and had always experienced himself as an ugly toad. As he grew older, he learned to live without feeling close to his peers, his wife, or his children. He endured this deprivation by preaching, “I do my thing, you do yours. . . . If we meet it’s beautiful. If not it can’t be helped.” Yet here he was—wanting, desiring, and needing another person—and unable to adopt his own “Truth” when his wishes weren’t met.

  Fritz was caught in a difficult ethical and social dilemma. As a therapist and a philosopher he knew that his Gestalt idea of “do your own thing” made sense for those he worked with. As a needy man, his heart demanded that Marty be obedient to him. These oppositional forces were responsible for one of his few lapses as a therapist. Ordinarily, Fritz saw others clearly because he had no need for them. Now he vacillated between being helpful and demanding, which caused both of them much anguish and confusion. Months went by before he eventually chose the proper path and withdrew from this insolvable bind.

  “Our roles started switching and changing when I called him on his role of being a perfect therapist. We always had formal
sessions, face to face; he was the therapist and I was the patient. As a therapist, he was perfect. He said all the right things in terms of philosophies, values, and attitudes, which were very different from the way I was raised and could really help me disengage myself from my major worries and responsibilities and the burdens of the weight of the world that I carried with me. For I was assuming responsibilities for everybody, and everything he said began to make sense and began to make life easier for me. Words are important, you know. Responsibility and obligation and all the things I was doing.

  “Then we would switch from our hour or two of formal therapy. We were then personal and lovers and into each other in all ways. The discrepancy showed up immediately in things like money and in things like sex. I had the perfect therapist. He told me I should fuck around. It was really a crazy thing to tell me. He created problems I didn’t really want. I’m ‘supposed’ to fuck around because my therapist tells me that. And I was suddenly the most luscious flower that thousands of bees started buzzing around. For the first time in my life, I was into sex. I must have smelled it and looked it and showed it. My husband would come home from work some days and say, ‘You’re so beautiful.’ And I would look at myself and see that I really was glowing and melting and people were responding to it.

  “So, I’d come to his home and talk about this man or that, one invitation or another. One voice said, ‘Yah. Fuck him.’ And the other voice said, ‘How dare you leave me alone? How dare you do this to me?’ Depending on which chair he was sitting in. In the therapy sessions he’d then say, ‘Okay. Express resentments.’ I would, and each time he’d say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ I’d think, ‘Swell. We really have our lines of communication open and he really does understand the double messages he’s feeding me, which really are driving me crazy.’ And then we’d go through the same thing again.

  “Yet my problem was that I did not trust what I saw because Fritz was the official psychiatrist whom I did trust. Brilliant, a genius, absolutely valid as a therapist I couldn’t doubt that. What I doubted was my perception of reality. When it came to a showdown on whose perception was really accurate, I gave him lip service, and I backed down. So, I really reinforced my own neurosis, in terms of not trusting me. I never gave up my perceptions. Fritz’s admiration of me was for my clear thinking—cutting through shit and seeing what was happening. Yet then I didn’t trust my perceptions, because they differed from what he was telling me was going on. And he’s my psychiatrist. He knows what he’s doing.

  “He really became psychotic when we started taking LSD together. But that was only part of it. Even before he started taking drugs he was psychotic, and it primarily manifested itself towards me and throughout his life in terms of paranoia.

  “I had an enormous number of things to do and we still spent a lot of time together. But if I was due at 10:30 and came at 10:45, I was late. Of course, the more demands he made on me, the later I would keep coming. I had lots of good excuses. I was running a home and kids and chauffeuring and going to school and writing papers and meeting people. And it was a burden for me, his happiness revolving around my presence. He lived for my getting there, physically. He was fine when we weren’t together, knowing I was doing my busy things. But he would invent ‘Whom is she seeing? What is she really doing?’ That kind of paranoia. And it was ridiculous, because I was leading a busy compartmentalized life occupied with things.

  “Fritz took acid first alone and then he introduced me to it. When we took our first trip, when the day was over, he looked at me and said, ‘Well, Marty. You’re certainly a lot less crazy than I imagined and I’m certainly a lot more crazy than I imagined.’

  “We took acid together but Fritz frequently took it alone. Because I was busy and wasn’t around and Fritz was alone, didn’t have much of a practice, and did have a lot of time. Fritz got into drugs even more heavily when he first moved to California. He tripped every other day. In Miami, he was tripping on Sandoz acid once a week. This was in fifty-nine, before the psychedelic revolution. Only a few people were into it.

  “He saw acid as a tool to get into his psychosis. He loved to use it, loved to become raving mad and get into his animal qualities. He loved to rant and rave and playact. He always had very violent tragedy-queen experiences with huge sobbings and great traumas and memories and feelings—much of it about his father. But instead of being a tool to work through his psychosis, it exacerbated his paranoia. Now I had a full-blown psychosis to deal with. For his focus in life was me, and our situation became worse. He became more and more demanding and I more and more surreptitiously spiteful. The crazier he got the less attractive he was to me and the more I resented our role-reversal with me being therapist and he patient. I felt, ME ME ME. I PATIENT.

  “That fall of fifty-nine was difficult, with Fritz getting into psychedelic drugs so heavily and my becoming more and more uncomfortable and feeling very, very crazy. I was aware that something terrible was happening to me, that symptomatically my neurosis was a lot worse than it had even been. The symptoms had changed, but what I had now were a lot more physically involving and terrible. And they had to be taken account of. When I was dead and frigid and miserable, that was okay. I didn’t know there was anything else. Now I wasn’t vicious or dead or mean or miserable, but anxious. Terrifying anxiety attacks. I still wasn’t getting along with people. I had no contacts, was phobic of everyone. Nobody knew about me and Fritz, and I was more devious and more sneaky than I had ever been in my life.

  “I was pretty devious about exposing myself before, anyway. Now there was a lot more I didn’t want exposed. Nobody knew we were lovers. My whole life with my husband had been kept secret and I was totally dependent, therefore, on one person in my life for any kind of contact, communication, sexuality, aliveness. My keeping our life a secret served Fritz’s needs as well. He never said, ‘Why don’t you leave your husband? Why don’t you tell him?’

  “Fritz no longer had the aura of ‘My psychiatrist is going to save me,’ because something pretty terrible was happening to me and my psychiatrist was pretty crazy. And I knew it, finally. For he wasn’t doing any of the things he was telling me to do.

  “Suddenly, Peter appeared out of the blue. He came five thousand miles from Europe to put himself in therapy with Fritz Perls. This gorgeous man walked into group one night and I thought, ‘Very interesting.’ It never occurred to me to make it on my own. I need someone to go to. I obviously wasn’t going to go to my husband or anyone I knew. And here was a lovely man, who was young and beautiful and vibrant and exciting and alive. We met in group a few times and then Fritz disappeared. He went to New York over Christmas and did his little tour. So, Peter and I were alone, without Fritz around, for about two weeks. We did see each other and play with each other, but Peter had some difficulties at the time so we never made it.

  “When Fritz came back he imagined what was going to happen. Out of the whole group we were the only people that he cared for. He loved Peter and he loved me. The rest of the group were background for him. He came back in very bad condition. Very paranoid. ‘What have you done?’

  “I told him about Peter and me: that we liked each other and played with each other and that Peter was all the things that I wanted—that Peter was good to me. And Fritz was very cruel to me. It was so nice being patted on the head again. Peter was like a good daddy to me and Fritz like my mother—a very cruel mother.

  “Fritz also came in hemorrhaging very badly from his ass and insisted that we go to bed together. In another part of his book he mentions how hard that was on me. He knew it. I am the cleanliness-and-godliness lady. And he was disgusting and dirty. He always was disgusting and dirty and he smelled. So, he came back from his sojourn just absolutely filthy and unkempt. And on top of everything, he’s laying in a pool of blood.

  “That was a very hard thing I did but I knew it was very important for him. Young, beautiful Peter was around and Fritz needed
me in his bed then. So, we slept together. Fritz’s rationale for his piles was totally unmedical and insane: it was fine bleeding from his ass because it had never been hemorrhaging, and bleeding from his ass was okay because it would keep him from having a stroke and a hemorrhage in his head. And this is a doctor? I heard this for two years knowing it was crazy. But with the pool of blood I could finally say, ‘This is crazy. It’s about time you went to a doctor and investigated the source of this bleeding.’

  “All this happened simultaneously. There were a lot of horrors of a physical nature going on. Fritz was in the hospital. Peter and I were out in the world—were not locked up. We’d visit him in the hospital and he’d call me day after day—really scared and lonely and phobic about me and Peter. At that point, I told him that Peter and I don’t go to bed and we don’t even play. It was really just nice being with him and talking to him. I felt very virtuous and very self-righteous because we weren’t fucking but really dug each other and especially grateful for meeting someone else in my life who was not crazy and could give me some perspective about Fritz. Because Peter was the only person who was now into our secret. It was a relief. He was the only person who could give me feedback. Like which one of us is crazy, me or Fritz?

  “Fritz came home from the hospital (his hemorrhoid operation was successful although he almost died on the table from an anesthesia reaction) and started recuperating. I started taking care of him—not full-time. For I was looking after everybody and doing everything. Shortly after, I got a phone call, and he said, ‘I’m not at home today. I’m again in the hospital.’ There was a great deal of anxiety in his voice and in his tears. Because there were real physical problems as well as the anxiety of Peter and I being on the loose in the world and he not being around. His bladder, kidneys, and urethra had clogged up so he had been in excruciating agony all night. In the morning, he called a doctor who got him to the hospital and immediately performed a second surgery on him. So, within two or three weeks Fritz had two major surgical procedures in and around his genitals. One was a prostatectomy and one a hemorrhoidectomy. That really gets any man—and, certainly, a sixty-six-year-old man whose involvement in sex was so consuming it was staggering.